Chapter 67
Having delivered the items America had ordered and received a certificate granting priority acquisition rights to Demon Lord materials, I said farewell in Okutama to the two who were setting out on their journey.
The Black Ship carrying Hiyori and the Professor will return to America along the western route, via China → India → the Mediterranean (Europe). It will be a voyage spent searching for survivor communities and recruiting fighting strength in each region.
I hope the two of them come back having grown a lot.
But honestly, I wouldn't mind if they came back smaller, as long as they came back. Being healthy and well is what matters most.
Less than an hour after saying goodbye to the two of them early that morning, a gigantic eight-legged shadow emerged from beyond the Mist of Confusion in Okutama. The wand I had made was tucked into a holder on one of its legs and equipped.
"Spider Witch-san! Over here, over here!"
When I waved from in front of the entrance, the Spider Witch raised one leg lightly in response, crawled up to me, and let out a sharp squeal.
"Good morning. Dairi, it's been a while. You look well..."
"You too, Spider Witch-san. You're as beautiful as ever."
Her form was just as captivating as when I had seen her before.
Her car-sized black body sprouted huge, vicious spines from its back, and its legs were densely covered in fine hairs.
Her seven compound eyes had an insectile, inorganic quality, like a machine whose emotions could not be read. It was reassuring.
She even had a good personality—what more could I ask for? Getting to know her was one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life.
The Spider Witch gave a squeak and offered a bolt of fabric tied together with string from around her abdomen. It was spider-silk cloth.
"Thank you. It's nothing special, but please accept it as a greeting..."
"Ah, I'm sorry you went to the trouble. You really didn't have to; I'm the one who's supposed to be receiving your protection. Shoot, I didn't prepare anything."
"It's fine, don't worry. I just prepared it on my own..."
After chatting lightly in front of the entrance, we went around to greet the residents.
First up were the fire lizards, though their homes had changed after they shed their skins the other day.
Tsubaki, the largest and most imposing of them, had claimed the reverberatory furnace as a home.
Mokutan, the friendliest one, occupied the earthen-floor hearth.
Sekitan, the most laid-back, was in the small furnace in the workshop.
They had each built separate nests out of metal and had begun sleeping there. They must have become too large to fit comfortably in a single nest.
The fire lizards, which had been only about eight centimeters long when they were born, had shot up to twelve centimeters.
They were still very young, though they would soon be two years old, but they played by stacking Fuyou's hand-me-down educational blocks with their forelegs and held contests among the three of them to see who could melt metal fastest. They could think about how things were structured, establish rules, and play accordingly. They were incredibly smart.
At this rate, they seemed likely to start talking someday. That was both frightening and exciting.
The three fire lizards had been lying side by side in the backyard on a battered firebrick, lazing around, but when the Spider Witch appeared, they were so startled that they rolled off the brick, squeaked, scattered sparks from their mouths, and threatened her.
"Ugh, I'm sorry... You must be scared..."
"S-sorry about my kids. I'm sure they'll gradually get used to you."
The Spider Witch became dejected, so after merely introducing them, we headed up the mountain behind the house.
The fire lizards had been wrapped up tightly in webbing by the Spider Witch when they first met her, so of course they were afraid.
I understood that their first impression had been terrible, but she was a good witch, so I hoped they would become friends with her.
Fuyou had put down roots on the mountain behind the house, in a place where she could look down on our home through the gaps between the trees. To welcome the Spider Witch, she had turned off the essential-oil spray that killed insect-type and fungus-type monsters.
As I had expected, Fuyou happily extended her vines when she saw the Spider Witch, grabbed one of her legs, and did something resembling a handshake.
"Hello, Spider-san! Let's be friends, okay?"
"Oh. Yes, let's... You aren't afraid of me either, are you...?"
"Hey, Spider-san, I want you to help me deal with bugs! The roots I stretch far away and my leaves get nibbled by bugs. Spiders eat bugs, right? Take care of me. Please!"
Fuyou waved her vines and arms about as she explained herself with all her might. This had been my idea.
If Fuyou came to hate the Spider Witch, she might throw a tantrum at some point and suddenly spray her essential oils, killing the Spider Witch. I needed these two to get along.
So beforehand, I had told Fuyou that spiders were carnivores who ate the pests that infested plants.
Fuyou's essential oils only worked on monsters, so they were useless against Earth-native insects. Apparently, it was a pain to exterminate pests herself every time. The Flower Witch—her mama—often scolded her in letters to take proper care of things, but she tended to slack off.
Fuyou was in a good mood after learning about this excellent arrangement in which the Spider Witch would help her.
"Fuyou-chan, right...? You did a good job asking so nicely. But I don't eat aphids or grasshoppers. I'm sorry..."
"Huh? You don't...?"
"But most spider-type monsters will obey my commands. Earth spiders are hit-or-miss, though. Would it be okay if I had my minions handle the pest control...?"
"Um, so that means you'll get rid of the bugs, right? Yay! Thanks, Spider-san!"
Fuyou smiled as if she were literally blooming and happily thanked her. The Spider Witch gave a sharp squeak.
Fear was visible to the Spider Witch. And the more frightened someone was, the more delicious they looked to her. Thanks in part to my coaching, Fuyou was favorably disposed toward the Spider Witch. Besides, to a plant, a carnivorous spider that ate pests was an ally, so a friendly relationship had been established.
The Spider Witch seemed delighted that the Flower Witch's daughter did not fear her in the slightest.
"Fuyou-chan is a good girl. When you grow up, you can become a beauty just like your mother..."
"Hee hee hee! I'm going to be more beautiful than Mother. Uncle said so!"
"I-I see... Dairi, you really shouldn't be trying to hit on every girl you meet..."
"I wasn't hitting on her. I wouldn't hit on a little kid like that."
Trying to hit on a two-year-old girl would be insane. And especially not a child whose birth I had personally attended. Stop making such slanderous accusations.
In fact, I had never hit on anyone in my life. I wouldn't even know how.
I waved one leg at the cheerful Fuyou in farewell, then guided the Spider Witch around after she had finished greeting the residents, giving her a quick tour of the area where I lived. She liked an old temple nearby and said she wanted to make it her nest.
When I gave her the go-ahead, she immediately began spinning silk and building her nest. I sat in the corner with my knees hugged to my chest, admiring the giant spider's artistic nest-building, but...
"It's embarrassing when you stare at me that much..."
So I made myself scarce.
She said it would take two or three days to finish building the nest and arranging everything, so I decided to spend that time reading the reference materials on magic letters.
It was something I had not gotten around to reading because I had been busy handling America's order.
Man, I had really been looking forward to reading this!
For years, Professor Ohinata had said, "The magic language has a written script." Magic letters that had only been predicted to exist, with no sign or trace of them anywhere, were now right in front of me! My excitement shot through the roof.
I prepared some tea and a basket piled high with homemade soy-sauce rice crackers, burrowed into the kotatsu, settled in for the long haul, and began turning the pages of the thick reference work on magic letters. It was packed with information worth a king's ransom.
First, magic letters could be viewed using a Möbius Loop Gremlin.
When magic was used with a Möbius Loop Gremlin, the inside of the loop glowed gold.
Apparently, if you looked inside the loop using a light-blocking panel, magic letters would appear within it.
I actually made a Möbius Loop Gremlin, put on sunglasses, and tried chanting the Fertility Magic Detour Incantation. Sure enough, I could see unknown letters rapidly appearing inside the loop.
Interesting. It seemed that the letters corresponding to the sounds I pronounced appeared one at a time, switching rapidly as they were displayed.
The pages on linguistic analysis and hypotheses were hard to understand because they contained too many technical terms, so I skimmed them, planning to read them properly later, and dug into the pages on the practical uses of magic letters.
Magic letters are letters.
Just as writing Japanese has no special effects, writing in the magic language is nothing more than writing.
To draw out the abilities hidden in magic letters, you have to inscribe them using a special alloy.
That alloy consists of 61% silver, 23% platinum, 10% gold, 2.6% iron, 1.4% copper, 1.1% titanium, and 0.9% Gremlin. It had the same composition as the metal adhering to the raw magic stone.
As soon as I read that far, I threw the reference material aside, sprang out of the kotatsu, grabbed a shovel from the agricultural shed, and dashed up the mountain.
What the heeeeeell!! I saw that alloy on the night of the first day of the Gremlin disaster!
It was the stuff clinging to the raw Octameteorite, right? I remember it. I was so focused on the magic stone that I just threw it away on the mountain.
Damn it, this was Sage Dairi's greatest lifelong blunder.
Of course it was a meteorite mineral! It had covered the magic stone! I should have suspected it had some significance. Damn it, I could have figured it out if I had just loosened up my thinking a little...!
I found the mineral buried under fallen leaves and mixed with the soil on the mountain, dug it up, and brought it home.
According to the reference material, writing letters with this metal made a form of magical-power control possible.
Magic letters contained symbols called rhetorical symbols. They could add meaning to a sentence or limit it, like expression marks in music. They could not completely change a sentence's meaning, but they could give it more emotional richness and depth.
The reference material contained a long list of rhetorical symbols.
There were quite a lot of them—twenty-eight in all. There was even a note saying that there were probably rhetorical symbols that had not yet been discovered.
Being symbols, the rhetorical symbols had simple shapes. There was one like the Japanese full stop, one like the Japanese comma, and one like the English period. There were also ones like two little dots placed side by side and ones resembling quotation marks tilted at an angle. They were easy to write.
But using them was not easy at all.
Rhetorical symbols were not something you could simply add to a sentence. There was grammar governing which symbols could be used with which letters or words, and which could not.
It was somewhat like the Japanese dakuten and handakuten, which can only be attached to certain characters. Ga, gi, gu, ge, and go exist, but not a, i, u, e, or o with a dakuten—at least not in ordinary usage.
Magic letters were written by connecting them along a single horizontal guideline—which, in this one respect, made them resemble Sanskrit—but even the same rhetorical symbol could have a different meaning depending on whether it was written above or below the guideline when the line was treated as a divider.
Basically, rhetorical symbols written above the guideline acquired a formal nuance of nobility, refinement, and politeness.
Those written below the guideline had a friendly nuance of childishness, vulgarity, and lightheartedness.
On a whim, I used a Möbius Loop Gremlin to chant "O flame," and every single rhetorical symbol appeared below the guideline.
Just as I thought. That guy's spells all sound idiotic.
The grammar governing rhetorical symbols did not end there. It contained brutally convoluted rules. Symbols with exactly the same shape and position could mean completely different things depending on context, and even symbols with regular usages had exceptions.
There was even a concept called an "existence symbol" that did not exist on Earth, so I struggled to understand the concept before I could even begin worrying about how to use it.
Just reading about it made my brain feel like it was going to overheat.
The information in this reference material had been written down by a second-rate practitioner of magic letters who had been aboard the Black Ship. That person had only been on the ship to maintain magical tools inscribed with magic letters. They could perform maintenance, but they could not write the letters from scratch. In other words, they were not an expert in magic letters.
If information written by a non-expert was already this extensive and this difficult, an expert's knowledge must be on an entirely different level. No wonder Professor Ohinata wanted to study them at their source.
Magic letters were difficult.
However, if I could master them, I would be able to engrave magic letters onto wands.
Not meaningless-looking letters meant merely as stylish decoration, but magic letters with actual meaning that would help their users—and look cool, too!
They were extremely difficult, but they were letters worth learning.
I steeled myself for the several months it would take to learn the basics of magic letters and prepared a handwriting-practice notebook, something I had not used since elementary school. This was the next step in my growth as a wandmaker. I was going to keep at it, one step at a time.